Stacia(full name Stacia Blake), born 26 December 1952 in Ireland, was a dancer for the English rock group Hawkwind. She is now a professional artist.

Stacia joined the band in 1971; however accounts vary as to how and why she began working with the band. Liner notes to In Search of Space indicate that poet and lyricist Robert Calvert recruited her for live shows; other sources state that she was a friend of Nik Turner, saxophonist and flautist for the band. In 2012, Turner told Mojo Magazine, “I met Stacia for the first time at the Isle of Wight… She said, “Can I dance with you?” and I said, “Yeah, but you must take off all your clothes and paint your body.” She took all her clothes off but unfortunately I didn’t have any body paint. That was like her audition.” In an interview in British music magazine Melody Maker, Stacia herself stated that she attended a show and, inspired by the music, got on stage and performed an impromptu dance to the band’s music. She immediately became an integral part of the live show after joining in 1971.

According to a 1974 interview in Penthouse, Stacia was six feet (183 cm) tall and “happily bisexual”. She regularly augmented her visual impact by performing topless or nude, her body decorated in iridescent or luminescent paint. In a 2007 BBC Four documentary, Lemmy described her as 6 ft 2 inches (188 cm) tall with a 52 inch (132 cm) bust and a bookbinder by trade. The same documentary said that she was working as a petrol pump attendant in Cornwall when she joined the band.

Stacia regarded what she did with the band as interpretive dance, and was an integral part of the early to mid-1970s Hawkwind show, particularly during the Space Ritual era. She left Hawkwind in 1975 after touring with them for the Warrior on the Edge of Time album. Her departure, along with that of Lemmy (who went on to form Motörhead) and Robert Calvert, signaled the end of an era; though Calvert, after a guest appearance with the band at the Reading festival, decided to rejoin the band full-time towards the end of that year.

A documentary that explores the counterculture of San Francisco in the mid-1960’s

The sex is free. The pot is cheap. Everyone can afford the acid.

Peace, love and groovy, mind-altering drugs are the topics at hand in this San Francisco freak-out documentary. It’s a crude but heartfelt time capsule, released in the summer of ’68, just before the Haight Asbury scene turned into one big, unwashed bummer. And even if director Jack O’Connell (THE GREENWICH VILLAGE STORY, SWEDISH FLY GIRLS) may not have made a great movie, he was at the right time, at the right place, and (most important) with the right tripped-out attitude… Much of the movie is random footage of the hippie phenomenon, while a cute, blond, 20-year-old runaway named “Today Malone” provides a (slight) framework to this ragged mess. And a bigger bunch of long-haired, wide-eyed freaks I’ve never seen — crammed shoulder-to-shoulder, celebrating the summer solstice in the Golden Gate Park. God, the stench of patchouli must’ve been nauseating!

Bands blast away, hippie chicks spin in circles, the lightshow begins, and it’s the same old acid haze we’ve come to know and love. Along the way, some interesting tidbits sneak in, including firsthand tales of getting busted, posted notes to runaway children, Ms. Malone unsuccessfully begging passers-by for spare change, a middle-aged nun describing how she’s similar to these “hippie girls,” and a typical hairball asked if he worries about chromosome damage from too much acid (when it’s, obviously, already too late). Of course, what movie about drugs is complete without a few suited “experts” (including San Francisco’s Director of Public Health and the thick-necked Chief of Police) warning about the evils of this new generation’s chemical dependence. But in the long run, this is a refreshingly pro-drug, pro-hippie pic that pushes the joys of LSD when Today doses on camera, and flies off on its mind-altering effects (actually, all they do is sit around a room, rolling their eyes and feeling a peach).

The filmmakers have all the bases covered. They document the oddest niches of Hippiedom, which appeals to the curious. There are plenty of groovy visuals, in case you’re dosed. They even toss in some nude performance art to suck in the T&A crowd. It also features ragamuffin fashion at its worst (not as ratty as today’s Squatter Chic look, but close), plus music by Country Joe and The Fish, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and The Steve Miller Band… Nowadays, this nonsense is impossible to watch without laughing at these naive, burnt-out rebels, and it’s a reality check for folks who think the hippie subculture was exactly like PSYCH-OUT or THE TRIP. Unfortunately, real life was a lot less charismatic than reel life. And whenever one these wide-eyed innocents vows they’ll never conform to The System, I’ll give you odds that nowadays, they’re somewhere in suburbia, selling Amway products and falling asleep to AMERICA’S FUNNIEST HOME VIDEOS.

Nobody for President!

Nobody keeps all campaign promises
As you read this, Nobody is in Washington working for you
I believe that Nobody should have that much power
I want Nobody to run my life
Nobody bakes Apple Pie better than my mom

“Media Burn” by Ant Farm. Excerpt from Ant Farm’s classic video art piece examining and satirizing the media, particularly the impact of television. On July 4, 1975, what a TV newscaster described as a “media circus” assembles at San Francisco’s Cow Palace Stadium. A pyramid of television sets are stacked, dowsed with kerosene, and set ablaze. Then a modified 1959 Cadillac El Dorado Biarritz, piloted by two drivers who are guided only by a video monitor between their bucket seats, crashes through the pyramid destroying the TV sets

Excerpt from Ant Farm’s classic video art piece examining and satirizing the media, particularly the impact of television. On the Fourth of July, 1975, artist-president John F. Kennedy (Doug Hall) delivers a speech about the media: “Now I ask you, my fellow Americans: Haven’t you ever wanted to put your foot through your television screen?” at San Francisco’s Cow Palace Stadium. You can watch the full video HERE.

When I saw this I realized The Plasmatics borrowed heavily from the piece for their video for ‘The Damned’

A 45-year-old man now living in the Bay Area may be the first person ever cured of the deadly disease AIDS, the result of the discovery of an apparent HIV immunity gene.

Timothy Ray Brown tested positive for HIV back in 1995, but has now entered scientific journals as the first man in world history to have that HIV virus completely eliminated from his body in what doctors call a “functional cure.”

Brown was living in Berlin, Germany back in 2007, dealing with HIV and leukemia, when scientists there gave him a bone marrow stem cell transplant that had astounding results.

Stumped for an original name for their newborn daughter, an Israeli couple took inspiration from social networking site Facebook and named her “Like,” Israeli daily Maariv reported on Monday.

The parents lifted the name from the popular feature on the site, which allows Facebook users to click on the word “like” and give the thumbs-up to comments, links and pictures posted by other users.

“We named her Like because it’s modern and innovative,” father Lior Adler told the mass-circulation paper. “I checked that the name does not exist elsewhere in the country, that was the main condition for me,” he said.

“In our opinion it’s the modern equivalent of the name Ahava (Love) he added. “It’s just my way of saying to my fantastic daughter, ‘love.'”

A group of researchers working at the Human Genome Project will be announcing soon that they made an astonishing scientific discovery: They believe so-called non-coding sequences (97%) in human DNA is no less than genetic code of an unknown extraterrestrial life form.

The non-coding sequences are common to all living organisms on Earth, from molds to fish to humans. In human DNA, they constitute larger part of the total genome, says Prof. Sam Chang, the group leader. Non-coding sequences, also known as “junk DNA”, were discovered years ago, and their function remains mystery.

Unlike normal genes, which carry the information that intracellular machinery uses to synthesize proteins, enzymes and other chemicals produced by our bodies, non-coding sequences are never used for any purpose. They are never expressed, meaning that the information they carry is never read, no substance is synthesized and they have no function at all. We exist on only 3% of our DNA.

Sometimes we travel to see a beautiful landscape, a precious artifact or a well-known painting. But other times our purpose is to experience something a little darker: to see a concentration camp where thousands of people were gassed to death, to visit a natural disaster zone that we’ve seen plastered across our TV screens, or to gawk at people living in poverty, sometimes with the intention of trying to help them.

All of these things and more have been encapsulated recently by the umbrella term of dark tourism. And while some people are quick to say they’d never be involved in something with a name like dark tourism, the scope is broad and you might be a dark tourist without realizing it.

Close allies of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have been accused of using supernatural powers to further his policies amid an increasingly bitter power struggle between him and the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Several people said to be close to the president and his chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, have been arrested in recent days and charged with being “magicians” and invoking djinns (spirits).

Ayandeh, an Iranian news website, described one of the arrested men, Abbas Ghaffari, as “a man with special skills in metaphysics and connections with the unknown worlds”.

Summary: At Beijing’s Songzhuang [art district], 57-year-old artist Cheng Li performed sexual behavior as an art exhibition, was taken away by police, and was sentenced to 1 year of re-education through labor. Re-education Through Labor Administration Committee documents show that “Cheng Li’s engaged in an obscene performance in the nude, attracting many onlookers, creating chaos at the scene”, establishing that he has created a public disturbance. Cheng Li’s lawyer is already in the process of applying for administrative reconsideration. Netizens engaged in intense discussion with regards to whether this was art or obscene.

Here is another fine example of the trend of violence in fast food restaurants. Two black females beating the hell out of a white patron, while several black employees stand by and watch. One black male manages to provide the facade of assistance to the white victim in this brutal attack.

The diverse wilderness of life inside of our bodies is just starting to gain the attention of scientists. The human gut alone typically holds some 100,000 billion bitty bacteria, and with no two people’s microbiomes being the same, classifying these crucial organisms has been challenging.

A new study, published online April 20 in Nature, proposes a simple schematic for profiling people’s gut microbiota, breaking down these helpful hangers-on into three overarching categories. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)

“The three gut types can explain why the uptake of medicines and nutrients varies from person to person,” Jeroen Raes, a bioinformatician at Vrije University in Brussels and coauthor of the new study, said in a prepared statement. “This knowledge could form the basis of personalized therapies,” by basing treatments on the known metabolic tendencies of a person’s microbiota category.

The “sievert”, as Elliott says, is a dose unit for quantifying radiation risk. He did not add that it assumes dose density is uniform. “There are many kinds of radiation”, he says, but he does not mention how they differ. In fact, external sources like cosmic rays and x-rays distribute their energy evenly, like the sun; others, notably alpha-emitters like uranium, are extremely uneven in the way they irradiate body tissue once they have been inhaled or swallowed.

Because alpha particles emitted from uranium atoms are relatively massive, they slow down rapidly, concentrating all their energy into a minuscule volume of tissue. Applying the sievert to this pinpoint of internal radiation means conceptualising it as a dose to the whole body. It’s an averaging error, like believing it makes no difference whether you sit by the fire to warm yourself or eat a burning coal. The scale of the error can be huge.

A rare look at the inside of Philip K. Dick’s condo! Here is the attendant interview, from Slash magazine, May 1980:

Philip K. Dick is 51 years old. Since 1955 he’s written 35 books that have been translated into eighteen languages. He has five ex-wives, two cats and lives 10 minutes from Disneyland. Of the books he has written, his personal favorites are, The Man in the High Castle, Dr. Bloodmoney, and Through a Scanner Darkly. His latest book, VALIS, will be released in February, with the sequel to be published sometime in the spring. Mr. Dick says he doesn’t take drugs anymore, but thinks about them all the time. Despite stories to the contrary, he’s a real charming guy.

The interview was conducted in Mr. Dick’s conapt by Gary and Nicole Panter. K.W. Jeter, one of Dick’s close friends and author of the yet unpublished but excellent DR. ADDER, attended and added his comments.

The woman started screaming, and was able to get her blindfold off, only to realize she was shackled to the ceiling in Hauff’s “torture chamber” filled with whips, syringes, belts, paddles, “sexual devices,” locks, ropes, chains, tubes, and two devices designed for “administer[ing] electricity to the human body.”

According to court documents, the walls in the “torture room” are eight inches think, “making most sounds—such as screams—emanating from inside the room almost undetectable.”

The woman asked Hauff to let her go, but he told her “no,” put the blindfold on her, and let the room for about 15 minutes. He returned and began plucking out the woman’s pubic hair, and then stuck electrodes to her and began shocking her. He did this for about three hours, police say.

Hauff then used a speculum and catheter on her, and bound her until some of her extremities turned blue.

Thanks projectfathom

A man who has had repeated bouts of depression cut off one of his own fingers, cooked it with some vegetables and ate it.

The bizarre case of “self-cannibalism” is the first known in New Zealand and one of only eight reported around the world.

✪ Classroom ‘slave sale’ prompts parent protests

Trying to bring a history lesson on the American Civil War to life, teacher Jessica Boyle turned her fourth grade Norfolk, Virginia, classroom into a slave auction: she ordered black and mixed-race students to one side of the classroom; then the white students took turns buying them.

A group of self-confessed radical pirates are pinning their hopes on gaining official recognition of their own unique belief system. The founders of the Missionary Church of Kopimism – who hold CTRL+C and CTRL+V as sacred symbols – hope that along with this acceptance will come harmony, not just with each other, but also with the police.

The area is a known UFO hotspot and video of the alien’s corpse has become a massive worldwide hit with hundreds of thousands of followers after being posted on the internet.

Almost half of the meat and poultry sold at U.S. supermarkets and grocery stores contains a type of bacteria that is potentially harmful to humans, a new study estimates.

Researchers tested 136 packages of chicken, turkey, pork, and ground beef purchased at 26 grocery stores in five cities around the country, and found that 47 percent contained Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus), a common cause of infection in people.

What’s more, roughly half of the contaminated samples contained strains of the bacteria that were resistant to at least three antibiotics, such as penicillin and tetracycline. Some strains were resistant to a half dozen or more.

✪ BP sues Halliburton in latest oil spill claim

BP Plc filed a lawsuit for more than $42 billion (25 billion pounds) against Halliburton (NYSE: HAL – news) , which cemented the blown-out well which caused the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, after claiming a similar sum from rig owner Transocean (NYSE: RIG – news) .

Analysts said BP had little chance of winning the cases and was more likely trying to force the companies to settle. Management experts said pursuing the lawsuits could further damaged BP’s already battered reputation as well as reveal yet more embarrassing details of the way the disaster was handled.

One year after the chocolaty crude started spewing out of the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, leading to the largest accidental oil spill in history, scientists say they’re still trying to piece together what’s happening to the environment.

Some potential clues about the impact of the spill have made themselves known: dead baby dolphins and sea turtles; oiled brown pelicans; fish with strange sores; sticky marsh grasses; tar balls on beaches.

But the big picture hasn’t come into focus yet.

It only takes one rained-out Little League game to make a sports lover resent Mother Nature. Now some of today’s scientists and other bigwigs have taken it upon themselves to say: “no more.” Not content to stand idly by and let something as mundane as climate dictate the success of our sports games, they have instead turned to geoengineering – intentional manipulation of the Earth’s environment – to fight back.

Qatari engineers recently announced a project to develop solar-powered artificial clouds to shade the 2022 World Cup from the country’s unforgiving summer sun. One remotely steerable cloud comes with a hefty price tag – $500,000 – just to cool the field by 10 degrees.

Some black holes have a complex internal structure that allows photons, particles and planets to orbit a central singularity, according to one scientist.

A singularity is the region in a black hole when space and time become infinite.

A Brazilian man has claimed his wife attempted to kill him by putting poison into her vagina and inviting him to drink from the furry cup.

The unnamed husband, from São José do Rio Preto, in the state of São Paulo, told cops he and his missus had an argument. She then allegedly doused her privates with a “toxic substance” before suggesting her other half eat at the Y.

Luckily for the intended victim, he smelt something fishy before diving in, and thwarted the cunning cunnilingual plan.

But when he collapsed in a pool of his own blood they started screaming in horror and rushed to help him, but his wounds were too severe and he died soon after.

Here’s one way to show your contempt of court.

Investigators say an Ohio man was caught on tape stealing a judge’s gavel from a courtroom in Lorain.

Footage shows a man identified as Christopher Collins, 39, entering Municipal Court Magistrate Chris Cook’s courtroom on March 30 and approaching the bench. Collins, accompanied by another individual who has not been charged, appears to grab the gavel and slip it into his shirtsleeve before exiting the empty courtroom.

Shocked food safety inspectors discovered pasta and biscuits crawling with parasites, rotting meats and dairy products, and olives covered in mold in the store of horrors.

The Michigan State Police have started using handheld machines called “extraction devices” to download personal information from motorists they pull over, even if they’re not suspected of any crime. Naturally, the ACLU has a problem with this.

The devices, sold by a company called Cellebrite, can download text messages, photos, video, and even GPS data from most brands of cell phones. The handheld machines have various interfaces to work with different models and can even bypass security passwords and access some information.

The problem as the ACLU sees it, is that accessing a citizen’s private phone information when there’s no probable cause creates a violation of the Constitution’s 4th Amendment, which protects us against unreasonable searches and seizures.

TESTS on a substance recovered during three drugs raids in a Plymouth street yesterday, believed to be the class A drug heroin, have revealed it was chocolate-flavoured protein powder.

Your iPhone has a hidden feature: It tracks and records your location constantly whether you want it to or not. What? You wish it wouldn’t do that without your knowledge or consent? Too bad, because there’s not much you can do about the tracking feature right now.

Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden, a pair of security researchers, recently discovered that iPhones — as well as 3G-enabled iPads — running iOS 4 constantly record and store their users’ locations in unencrypted files. These files are basically very long lists of latitude-longitude coordinates and timestamps, and they can be found on the devices themselves as well as within the software backups saved on users’ computers.

✪ NJ woman chides NYC smoker, gets stabbed with pen

A New Jersey woman was stabbed in the face with a pen on a New York City subway train after she tried to stop a man from lighting a cigarette.

The assault occurred on a crowded No. 3 train near the Chambers Street station during Tuesday’s morning rush.

Witnesses told the Daily News and the New York Post that an argument quickly escalated when Evelyn Seeger asked the man not to smoke. The witnesses say two riders were trying to restrain the man when he pulled out a pen and slashed Seeger’s face. Thanks Ramon